Making a Memorable Holiday Card: It’s About Personality

For Bob Oxman, Vice President of Creative Services at Paskill Stapleton & Lord, the holidays are an opportunity to spread some good cheer to clients across the country, and to do so while being exceptionally imaginative.

In the past 15 years, Bob’s orchestrated company holiday greeting cards for PS&L that range in style and approach, from a mystical Santa wishing good luck and good fortune to the agency’s historic location in Glenside reimagined as an enormous doghouse.

The cards of holidays past have also featured PS&L staffers, who have appeared as cookies, elves, ornaments, 2,200-year-old Chinese terracotta soldiers, and even as characters from The Simpsons.

While Bob conceives of the cards’ concepts, he has worked closely with talented PS&L Graphic Designer and Illustrator Nick DeNucci to produce each card. For Nick that has meant not only rendering new Simpsons characters, but updating downtown Springfield to include Paskill Stapleton & Lord. He has also turned coworkers into red-and-green iced cookies and created a dorm room scene (ramen included) for a multitude of red-cheeked elves on a shelf. Nick says these have been a lot of fun to create, even when labor intensive, and named other favorite cards as those with the themes of Peace Train, U.F.O., and Fruit Cake. Another holiday card highlight for Nick: transforming the PS&L building into gingerbread.

Bob and Nick also have appeared in the cards: in high fashion, donning tuxedos with colleagues, both human and canine, and assembled in a lavish dinner party a from a found photograph depicting an actual event; in a comic book: Bob adding his two cents via speech bubble in a multi-paged issue; and Bob holding a dreidel, while perched on top of a festive mantle with Nick and the whole PS&L team.

According to Bob, when creating your holiday card what matters most is its personality. “The holidays are about meeting and greeting. Your card should give a glimpse into what it might be like to visit your home this time of year,” he says. “It should feel warm and neighborly as if you are inviting friends, even strangers, inside.”

Cathy Donovan,

A higher education professional with more than a decade serving in various communications roles at a Big 10 university. At PS&L, Cathy is busy implementing a marketing plan to promote the company’s visibility and various offerings, from training workshops to assessment services to our annual conference, through trade shows, email marketing, and digital strategy. Cathy also manages psandl.com, social media efforts, and agency publications. She can be reached at [email protected]